Man on a Rope

by George Harmon Coxe

  “What are you going to do about the diamonds?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  “Maybe I can help you.”

  “Oh?”

  “If you’re determined to cheat me I might as well make you sorry you did,” she said. “I think it’s time I had a frank talk with Superintendent Kerby.”

  She paused to see if he would reply, but by then Barry had no ready words, only a growing dryness at the back of his throat.

  “I’ll have to tell him that Colin phoned me. I’ll tell him how I hurried there after the shower and saw you come out of the bungalow and run down the street. I’ll say I didn’t understand it until I stepped into the living-room and saw Colin lying on the floor.

  “In those first moments of shock,” she said, “I didn’t know what had happened or what to think. As I rushed up to him I thought I saw a hand twitch. I dropped to my knees and called to him and tried to rouse him as he lay there on his side, and then I saw his lips move. I bent over him. I asked him what it was. He did not open his eyes, but the lips moved again and this time, by leaning close, I heard him say: ‘Dawson … Dawson did it.’”

  An icicle slid lightly up Barry’s spine and left the back of his neck cold. He swallowed.

  “But that’s not true,” he said.

  “It’s close enough,” she said coldly. “He was dead when I found him. He didn’t say anything, but I’m the only one who knows that. For all I know, you could have killed him. I never thought you did and I’m not sure why except I didn’t think you were the kind that would do such a thing. But I think Kerby would believe me, don’t you?”

  Barry eased down on the arm of a chair, understanding instantly that this woman had the capacity to do exactly what she threatened. There was a singleness of purpose here that was frightening. For this was not the dutiful and loving wife—he recalled the picture she had drawn for him the night before—of a young English engineer who married her and took her to Belize. This was the woman who had battled relentlessly against the rawer aspects of life as a hostess and B-girl in Miami and Havana and Panama.

  The thought that she had been cheated had now become a complex. To her only the diamonds were important and whoever thwarted her would have to pay. Kerby would most certainly believe her story, at least in the beginning, and unless there was some small miracle to clear him Barry would most certainly stand trial for murder.

  He did not say anything as his thoughts moved on. He was looking out the window, seeing the branches of the frangipani tree, aware that Muriel was waiting motionless, giving him time to understand exactly how he stood. That noon he had told Lynn Sanford that he had a tiger by the tail; he had wanted time to think. Now there was no more time, and the trap was closing and—

  Like that his brain picked up a hitherto unknown fact, tiny but enormously significant. Then, suddenly, as his mind focused inward, the pressure of his thoughts produced a small kernel of hope. There was no time now to nurse it properly, but because a chance was offered where none had been before, he knew what he had to do. He looked back at her, still thinking furiously.

  “Suppose I deliver the pouch,” he said, his tone clipped. “How do I know you still won’t go to Kerby with that phony yarn?”

  “I want the diamonds, not revenge.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Once I get them I’m not going to worry about you. I’m going to worry about hanging on to them, and I’ll be sure you won’t talk either—because if you do I can still tell my story.”

  “Okay.” Barry rose, his mind made up as his new-found idea began to take shape. “But you’ll have to wait until after dark.”

  “After dark?” She came to her feet, the upward-slanting eyes puzzled and suspicious. “Why?”

  “They’re out there.” He jerked his head to indicate the expanse of hotel grounds. “I’ve got to dig and I can’t do it in daylight, can I?”

  She accepted this, and deep down in her eyes excitement stirred.

  “How about ten o’clock?” he said. “Shall I bring them to your place?”

  She thought it over. “Boyd’s.”

  “So he’s in it with you.”

  “Possibly,” she said with an air of detachment. “Does it matter?”

  “Not to me, it doesn’t. But did it ever occur to you that you might be running away with a killer?”

  She eyed him gravely, her head tilted. “It occurred to me,” she said finally, “but I don’t believe it.”

  “He was there. He searched Lambert’s desk.”

  “He told me why. But that was after you had left. If Colin was dead then, he was dead when Boyd got there.”

  “Unless,” Barry said quietly, “there was a time before that he forgot to mention.”

  Her shoulders moved in a faint shrug. “But who said I was going away with anyone?” she asked. “I’d rather you came to his place because it has more privacy than my flat…. Ten o’clock,” she said. “And come alone, Barry. I’m not fooling.”

  He opened the door for her. He said he knew she wasn’t fooling. “Neither am I,” he called softly as she started along the hall.

  In his room again with the door closed he began to pace. Ten paces to the window seat, ten paces back, brows knotted and the muscles tight along the angle of his jaw. For an excitement all his own was firing his brain and there were still some things he wanted to do before the afternoon ended. When a glance at his watch told him that it was nearly five o’clock, he opened the door again and hurried down the hall.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  LYNN SANFORD had finished typing the letters Louis Amanti had given her and was just checking them for mistakes when Superintendent Kerby opened the door of the outer office and politely removed his cap. Impeccable as always in his freshly cleaned shorts and jacket, he offered a small smile, brought his heels together lightly, and asked if it would be possible to see Mr. Amanti.

  “I’m sure it will,” she said. “Just a moment and I’ll ask him.”

  The door of the inner office was open and she stopped just across the threshold to announce the visitor. Amanti frowned for a moment while things happened behind his bespectacled eyes and then he jumped to his feet.

  “Of course, of course,” he said, coming around his desk. “Come in, sir,” he called from his doorway. “Come right in.”

  He stood aside to let Kerby pass before him and then closed the door. Because the transom was open Lynn could hear the rumble of their voices and by listening she could follow the conversation rather well. At first she tried deliberately not to and went about the business of folding the letters and stuffing the envelopes. Her watch said that in twenty minutes she would be through for the day and when she had stamped the envelopes she leaned back in her chair and glanced at the closed doorway, beginning to wonder about the Superintendent’s call in spite of herself but not actually listening until she heard Barry Dawson’s name mentioned.

  Instantly then all the worry that had begun at lunch when she knew the truth about Barry’s position came back to increase her uneasiness. She could not hear all the words, but she heard Kerby say something about diamonds. She heard Amanti reply, heard the word “estate.” Finally, because she could stand such uncertainty no longer, she did something she had never done before in her well-bred young life.

  On tiptoe as she eased to her feet, she moved silently over to the door. She bent her head, her ear no more than inches from the panel. Then, with no further thought about propriety or the ethics of the situation, she began to eavesdrop, finding to her delight that it helped enormously to be so close. The voices took on character and she could tell who was speaking.

  “Just wanted to check with you, you know,” Kerby was saying. “I felt quite sure that if you’d had any word on the diamonds you’d be in touch with us.”

  “I’ve heard nothing,” Amanti said. “Nothing at all. I take it you feel that they are the key to the murder?”

  “I don’t know how else to look at it,” Kerby sa
id. “Most everyone admits he knew that there were diamonds being withheld, but we can only be certain about two—aside from Lambert, that is—who actually knew they were in that desk safe the night of the murder.”

  “Hudson and Dawson.”

  “Exactly. We searched Dawson’s room the first night, though we hardly expected to find anything. A hotel room doesn’t offer many hiding-places; a man would be a fool to try.”

  “Quite,” Amanti said. “If Dawson had them he’d have to hide them somewhere outside the room. But I suppose you’ve already considered that possibility.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, as I understand it, the diamonds were in a pouch.”

  “I believe so.”

  “A pouch could be buried, couldn’t it? And wouldn’t the hotel grounds offer a likely place? Somewhere under one of those shrubs or small trees perhaps.”

  The words shocked Lynn and she nearly cried out in protest. At that moment she hated Amanti for suggesting the possibility even though she knew it could be nothing more than an idle guess. She offered a silent prayer that Kerby would ignore the suggestion and waited with held breath for him to reply. When it came she was suddenly weak all over.

  “I’ve been wondering the same thing myself,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I’d been toying with the idea of getting a crew together and doing a bit of prospecting outside Dawson’s window; Hudson’s too. If those stones don’t turn up before morning—”

  The scrape of his chair startled her so she lost the rest of the sentence, but she was back in the chair pretending to be busy when the door opened. After that she did not look up until the outer door closed, but sat there outwardly occupied but shaking inside.

  She heard Amanti go back into his office, the creak of his desk chair, but all she could think of was Barry. There was not the slightest doubt in her mind that the police would find the diamond pouch in the morning; nor was there any doubt that, once it was found so close to his windows, he would be arrested. The only way to prevent this from happening was to make sure the pouch was not there when the search began. And suddenly a strange determination that was born of fear and desperation seized her and she knew what she had to do.

  It was no longer enough that she warn Barry and urge him to take the pouch from its hiding-place. He still might be caught trying to dispose of it. If such a thing happened he could never convince the police of his innocence. But if she took them—and why couldn’t she dig them up, since she knew where they were?—the danger to him would be gone….

  Her thoughts bogged down at that point. Already in fancy she had the pouch, but what then? She couldn’t keep it; there was no one she could trust. She couldn’t just walk into Police Headquarters and say she had found it. Such a thing, done anonymously, might turn the trick, and having accepted this much, she put her mind to work on ways and means. The answer that finally came seemed a bit fantastic, even to her, but when she understood that she could hurt no one but herself by trying she stood up and walked into Amanti’s office.

  He gave her a curious look when she asked if she could speak to him, but he stood up politely and motioned her to a chair. He was again dressed in one of his white suits, complete with waistcoat, and she found herself wondering if this insistence on the proper dress at all times was his wife’s doing.

  She composed her face as she sat down. She composed her mind and sorted her thoughts and spoke directly.

  “What would happen if you found the missing diamonds, Mr. Amanti?” she asked. “Would you turn them over to the police?”

  She watched the dark eyes Wink at her and saw the frown growing. She watched him sit up in his chair and the mouth grow crooked with his smile.

  “Do you think it’s likely that I’ll find them?”

  “I didn’t mean find, exactly,” she said. “I was just thinking that the person who has them might be afraid the police would find them.”

  “I should think he might.”

  “He might be scared enough to want to get rid of them.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “But he would hardly throw them away, not anything as valuable as that. He’d be more likely to leave them where they could be found by the proper person, wouldn’t he?”

  He was still watching her, the smile fixed, but behind the lenses something was happening to his eyes. She could not tell what it was—speculation, a certain wariness?—but it served to warn her to be careful.

  “Are you trying to tell me that you have the diamonds, Miss Sanford?” he asked softly.

  “Oh, my, no,” she said innocently.

  “And you don’t know where they are?”

  “No.”

  “Then yours is a purely hypothetical question?” he said, a mild irony in his voice.

  “Very much so.”

  “Do you have any particular place in mind where I might be expected to find these diamonds?”

  “Well”—she gestured with one hand to give the impression that she was merely offering the first thought that entered her head—“suppose you came back here tonight to work and found them on your desk. You’d tell the police, wouldn’t you?”

  “That would be the proper thing to do,” he said, “but first I think I’d wonder how I’d explain my find to the police. They would want to know how anyone could get in here to leave the diamonds, wouldn’t they? I’d have to tell them that I had the lock changed and that there were only two keys—yours and mine.”

  The reply was disconcerting because she had not considered the possibility. Again she cautioned herself, for this was a clever man and she had already aroused his suspicion.

  “You could tell them you were working in your office when someone knocked at the door. Naturally you’d walk out to see who it was.”

  “Naturally.”

  “By the time you reached it and looked out, whoever had knocked was gone.”

  “Leaving the pouch on the landing for me to find.”

  “Yes.” She folded her hands in her lap and smiled at him in an effort to disguise her growing nervousness. “Wouldn’t they believe you?”.

  “I suppose they’d have to,” he said. “It could happen that way. People have returned stolen things that became too dangerous for them before.”

  He moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue and interlaced his plump fingers in front of him on the desk.

  “Tell me, Miss Sanford,” he said. “In this hypothetical case of yours do you think it’s likely that this person might actually leave the pouch?”

  “I think he might if he was sure he wouldn’t be caught.”

  “You think this might happen tonight?”

  “It might.”

  “Would you have any particular time in mind?”

  “Probably not before ten o’clock.”

  She was looking right at him now and he was still smiling. Outwardly his manner remained indulgent and the softcadence of his voice never varied or showed any particular interest. He continued in the same way, but this time the glasses could not mask the strange lights that flickered in his eyes and were gone.

  “Since this is only a hypothetical case,” he said, “I can assure you that the office will be empty until after ten o’clock tonight. Mrs. Amanti and I are dining out and I feel certain we won’t be home before ten. After that I may stop here; I often do.”

  He half rose to indicate that the interview was over. He consulted the gold watch he pulled from his vest pocket as she came to her feet.

  “I’m glad you raised the question,” he said. “Naturally, matters of this nature must be held in strictest confidence…. You won’t forget to drop those letters off on your way home.”

  She said she would attend to them. She closed her desk and gathered her things, stopping only long enough to fix her mouth and rinse her hands at the washbowl behind the screen. There was a closet midway between Amanti’s door and the outer one, a small boxlike enclosure used for storing supplies. Amanti never used it, but it serve
d as a wardrobe for her and its three hooks were sufficient for her needs.

  The germ of the idea that was to change her plans so decisively came as she took her jacket from one of the hooks. When she had put it on she felt her hair and came back to her desk to get her bag and the letters. She said: “Good night, Mr. Amanti,” and started to walk past the closet door, which still stood partly open.

  What she did then was not motivated by any conscious thought or any consideration of the consequences. It was an impulse, pure and simple, that shaped her course, but the component parts of that impulse were many and varied.

  Barry had planted the seed of her doubt about Mr. Amanti. Barry was the one who had suggested that perhaps her employer was not the exemplary character she had assumed him to be. There was little to substantiate the suggestion that Amanti might have been short in his accounts, that he feared the settlement that would have to be made when Lambert’s will was signed and the estate audited. But there was no longer any doubt in her mind that Amanti had removed the notebook which contained the original record of those assets.

  A list had been stolen from Lambert’s desk; the copy had been taken from the files. But only Amanti could have known which notebook to take. There was no one now to accuse him of any irregularity.

  It is questionable if such thoughts influenced her at the moment; rather it was an accumulation of thoughts that somehow combined to leave the intuitive impression that Mr. Amanti could no longer be trusted. It was of such intangibles that the impulse was born, and the time involved in its acceptance was no more than a fraction of a second.

  She had to find out more about Mr. Amanti and as she passed the closet door she knew how to do it. Two more hard-heeled steps took her to the outer door and she rattled the knob as she opened it. She closed it with authority, still on the inside of the office. For another long moment she listened. When she could hear no movement in the inner office, she moved soundlessly back to the closet, slid inside and closed the door until only a tiny crack remained.